Page 60 of Beautiful Savage
Halfway through packing, she pauses with an armful of clothes. Her eyes go to the wall above the bed. The painting. Her father's watercolor of my garden, the streak still visible in the leftmost bloom. She stares at it for three seconds, her face doing something I read as goodbye to the room. Then back to the duffel.
While she's in the closet for the last load, I move to the desk. Open the operational logbook. Find the Day 27 page. The day she kissed me back. Tear it out along the perforation. Fold it once, twice. Small enough to hide.
I cross to the bed, lift the leotard she's placed on top. There's an inner pocket in the bodice. I slip the folded page inside, replace the leotard. Nine seconds total. She doesn't see. The logbook page hidden where she might find it, or might not. Evidence of what I've done, what I am, tucked against the fabric that will touch her skin.
She finishes packing. Ten minutes of neither of us speaking. The apartment holds our silence like it's something physical. It already feels like a ghost lives here.
At the door, duffels at her feet, we face each other. Three feet between us that might as well be three miles.
"Stay alive," she says.
The dry register that cuts deepest. Not "I love you." She's never said it, won't say it as a goodbye. Just the hardest thing she could ask of me.
"Daphne."
Just her name. I won't say the words either. Won't make this a goodbye. The others will have questions about her leaving. Adrian will give me that knowing look. Marisol will probably say she saw this coming. Let them.
She kisses me then. Hard, brief, maybe four seconds of her mouth pressing everything we're not saying against mine. She kisses me like she's branding me, like she knows I'll taste her on my mouth for days, like she's marking me as hers even as I send her away. Then she breaks it, picks up her duffels, walks through the door.
I stand in the doorway watching her descend with Logan's men. The GPS tracker in their car will show me every mile she travels away from me. The car door closes. The engine starts. I move to the window, watch the black SUV turn onto Calle Ocho, head north, disappear around the second corner.
Gone.
My chest feels like someone reached in and tore something out by the root. Watching the one good thing you've ever had walk away.
The apartment is the same but different. Her side of the bed unmade where she didn't have time to fix it. The closet half-empty. The helmet on the floor like an accusation. The apartment echoes wrong without her breathing in it.
I cross to the bed. Above it, the painting of my garden. Bougainvillea spilling across the stone bench I've sat on every morning for nine years. The streak through the leftmost bloomfrom where the old man spilled water that morning I found him. I can't look at it now. Not with her gone.
I lift the painting off the two small nails, the paper buckling slightly in my hands. Carry it to the desk, open the drawer where I keep batteries and spare supplies. Lay the painting face-down in the drawer, on top of everything. Close the drawer.
The verdict settles back into my chest, familiar as my own pulse. I'm the man who destroys what he touches. The troubled veteran the papers write about. The monster parents pull their children away from.
For two weeks I let myself believe I could be something else. That the bubble could hold. That loving her could change what I am. That I could be the kind of man who brings home croissants.
But the paper told the truth. The verdict was always there, waiting. When Tuesday comes and Hallstein goes down, I'll be exactly who they said I was. The unstable soldier with the grudge. And she'll be safe in Pristine with her father and his roses, nowhere near me when I detonate.
22 - Daphne
Pristine’s welcome sign still claims POPULATION 4,217, though I know at least three families have left since I was last here.
Logan's security men are efficient, professional. One checks the cottage perimeter while the other unloads my duffels. They'll rotate twelve-hour shifts from the corner, one tells me. Until Gunner clears the detail. I nod without speaking, my anger still too hot for words.
Nicolas opens the door before I reach the porch. Paint-stained shirt, cerulean smudge on his left thumb, glasses pushed up on his forehead. He's been working. He hasn't been told I'm coming.
"I didn't know you were coming,mija." Warm, no edge, no confusion.
I can't explain, not with this anger burning so hot in my chest that any words would come out sharp enough to wound him. I tell him I'm home for a few days, standing on the porch with duffels at my feet and a face he hasn't seen in years: his daughter furious at someone who isn't Nicolas.
He reads it. Doesn't push.
Inside, the cottage closes around me, every smell a small wound. Linseed oil from the studio, faint cedar of old floorboards. The hallway runs straight back: kitchen at the end, bedrooms right, living room left.
I go to my room first. Everything exactly as I left it. The single bed, the dresser from when I was twelve, Maman's photographon the nightstand. Through the window, the heritage roses bloom on their arbor. I unpack partially: the clothes from Gunner's closet, the small jewelry pouch, the leotard he bought me, which goes into the bottom drawer beside the original that has lived there for seven years. Not everything. I'm not ready to know how long I'll actually be here.
Coming back down the hallway, I turn left into the living room.
The portrait pulls me up short.
